High-ranked DEA agent quits job to work for legal marijuana industry

The chief of operations at the United States Drug Enforcement Agency said only last week that increased efforts as of late to legalize marijuana across the country is scaring his fellow officials at the DEA. Others, however, have a much different take.

Just last Wednesday,
the DEA’s James L. Capra told members of the Senate that the
emerging pro-pot trend is “reckless,”
“irresponsible” and “scares us.”

Former DEA agent Patrick Moen isn’t in the same boat. After over
a decade of working with the federal government to put away drug
dealers, Moen recently abandoned his job at the DEA in order to
pursue a career with Privateer Holdings, a Seattle,
Washington-based investment firm that specializes in the budding
marijuana industry.

Since 2010, Privateer has been putting money into the hands of
start-ups that are looking to work their way up in the legal weed
business. Moen just recently left the DEA after more than 10
years, and since November has been Privateer’s managing director
of compliance and their senior counsel.

"I saw this as an amazing opportunity to be a part of the
team that's helping to create this industry," Moen, 36, told
Reuters. "I don't really feel like it's the other
side."

Maybe Moen’s right, but there’s no doubt it’s something at least
a little different for the long-time cop. According to his
LinkedIn profile, he spent five-and-a-half years working as a
law enforcement officer around Buffalo, New York, and then signed
on for what became a decade as a DEA under the Department of
Justice starting in 2003. Before calling it quits, he had managed
to hold high-positioned jobs in both Washington and Oregon
supervising teams of drug enforcement agents.

“Over the course of years I realized that the targeting of
marijuana was not an effective use of resources. There was no
‘aha’ moment. It was a steady evolution involving discussions
with friends and colleagues,” he told the
Seattle Times last month.

Then, Moen told the paper, “the general dysfunction of the
federal government” helped him consider new career options.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, he suggested that the
expanding legal weed business in the US is on track to becoming
an all too important industry.

"The potential social and financial returns are
enormous," he told WSJ last month. "The attitudes toward
cannabis are shifting rapidly."

Indeed, the national discussion with regards to weed has changed
drastically in just the five weeks since word of Moen’s career
change started to spur headlines. In the month between reports of
his Privateer gig first surfacing and Reuters’ article on Monday
this week, marijuana became completely legal for adults in the
state of Colorado to purchase for recreational use. Revenues
in the first few days beat expectations by several times over,
and hundreds of millions of dollars are expected to be raised
during the next year. Washington state will soon follow
Colorado’s lead, and Moen and his colleagues at Privateer will
have a whole new locale to tap.

According to the WSJ, Privateer raised $7 million as of last
month and was looking to bring in another $25 million during
2015. Investors are obligated to initial commitments of no less
than $250,000, and eventually the firm uses this capital to back
cannabis-centric projects, like the website Leafy.com.

But on the heels of legalization efforts in those two states,
other jurisdictions across the country are coming to terms with
what could soon be a widespread phenomenon in America: totally
legal, recreational pot.

The results of a CNN/ORC International survey published earlier
this month found that 55 percent of those questioned across the
US favor marijuana legalization, and this past weekend US
President Barack Obama offered the closing thing yet to an
endorsement.

"As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I
view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the
cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk
of my adult life. I don't think it is more dangerous than
alcohol," he told the New Yorker.

Other federal officials — or former ones, at least — are starting
to speak up too about the long-lasting pot prohibition. Paul
Schmidt was the highest-ranking DEA agent in all of Oregon state
until 2010, but now works as a medical marijuana business
consultant.

"A lot of people say, 'How could you be so against it Monday
and then on Tuesday you are all for it?" Schmidt said to
Oregon Live recently.

"It was the least of the evils," he said. "If you go
to the newer law enforcement – somewhere 45 years and younger –
and you talk to them about cannabis, they are just like, 'Man,
why isn't it legal? I have got other things to do.'"

At this rate, that could soon be the consensus across the board.
Washington, DC moved forward earlier this month with a measure
that would decriminalize marijuana in the nation’s capital, and
medical weed is currently legal in nearly half
of the US.